Everything became clearer in November 2005 in the Vidhan Sabha (State Legislative Assembly) in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh (UP). I was there to get to know women Members of the Assembly (MLAs). While in the Assembly library, I had been reading through the MLA profile handbook when my attention fell on a recurrent theme listed under the women MLAs’ interests: social service (samaj seva), social work (samaj karya), or activities that resonate with the ethos of one or the other. Seva evokes principles of selflessness and sacrifice that starkly contrasts the image of the power-seeking politician that lingers in public discourse. In the handbook, rarely had women combined an interest in politics with samaj seva and samaj karya. Interestingly, the schism between service and politics found in these women's profiles was not a feature of the profiles of male MLAs.

Given its charged presence in Indian history, seva's textual ubiquity has not come entirely as a surprise. Scholarship on seva as a principle of political action has shown how it married class, caste, and gender across colonial and postcolonial politics regardless of ideological orientation.Footnote ¹Seva's presence in the sancta of UP politics further fuelled my interest as I researched Dalit and low-caste women in politics in several different contexts in UP over the previous two years.Footnote ² During this time, women from different parties and backgrounds I came to know often used seva to talk about their role as politicians.Footnote ³ These women borrowed a mobilization idiom that historically has been successful in translating the moral peril arising from activities carried out in public—for women who might have experienced seclusion regimes—into the honor of rendering selfless service to the nation. Considering the Hindu matrix of seva, its appropriation by a number of Dalit and low-caste women party activists within a political formation such as the Bahujan Samaj Party (the majority of the people's party, or BSP) prompts several questions. These stem from this party's particular positioning along the political spectrum: since its inception in 1984, the BSP has vigorously attacked Hindu caste hierarchies and subverted the language of politics and the sociology of participation, with its leadership and mass support drawn from Dalit castes. Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, the Dalit leader and architect of the Indian constitution whose conversion to Buddhism encouraged many Dalits to follow his footsteps, is one of the party's main inspirational figures. Last but not least, the language through which social justice claims have been articulated within the Dalit movement and the BSP has been one of rights rather than one of service. What, then, explains BSP women's use of seva, and what does seva stand for? A digression into late colonial India will help fine-tune these questions.

In Serving the Nation, Carey Watt (Reference Watt2005) traces the genealogy of seva to the masculinity project that arose from the burgeoning associational character of late colonial India (on the male gender of seva, see the genealogy of this idiom within the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS] in Beckerlegge Reference Beckerlegge, Zavos, Wyatt and Hewitt2004). Despite also being drawn from low-caste communities, Watt contends that the majority of servants originated from an upper-caste and upper-class milieu with those from the low castes being their beneficiaries. Watt points out that for women, at least in the first decades of the twentieth century, seva mainly referred to pati seva (service to the husband) in the context of the family. According to a well-known historical account, when called by Gandhi to serve the nation, women shifted the meaning of seva from the private to the public sphere, laying the foundation for social work to serve as a gateway to political careers for women (Forbes Reference Forbes2005, 25).

But there is a parallel history to seva that adds significance to BSP women's use of this idiom. At the high point of the struggle for Indian independence, Ambedkar staunchly critized the implication of subordination in seva vis-à-vis the untouchables in the way seva had been deployed by Gandhi. Ajay Skaria captures the hierarchical connotations of Gandhi's socio-political practice of seva vis-à-vis the untouchable as follows: “To recognize the untouchable as harijan [children of God, my note] was to respond to the impossibility of friendship with the subaltern by transforming the subaltern through darshan. In this manner, imbued with divinity, the subaltern could be offered seva, and the concomitant tapasya, that was offered to the friend” (Reference Skaria2002, 980). Unlike what is generally regarded as Ambedkar's stance on seva, the leader was not contrary to the idea of service per se. To fully appreciate this lesser-known point, a brief analysis is required of the debate between Gandhi and the Dalit leader on their different views on the removal of untouchability and the workings of the Harijan Sevak Sangh.

Ambedkar was a board member of the All-India Anti-Untouchability League—the original name of the Sangh when it was founded in 1932. In What has the Congress and Gandhi done to the untouchables Ambedkar criticized the Sangh's approach to the untouchability question because it focused on the educational, economic, and social uplift of the “Depressed classes” (untouchables) rather than on radical measures such as the abolition of the caste system and inter-dining (Reference Ambedkar1946, 127ff). Ambedkar's opposition to the Sangh stemmed from its failure to implement the program that he had devised for this association, which would have Dalits helping each other. He believed these workers would most certainly “regard the work as love's labour” (Reference Ambedkar1946, 139). This sentiment could well be translated into an “untouchable-to-untouchable” provision of social service: as Srivatsan has put it: Ambedkar's “imagination of harijan [“children of God” as untouchable/Dalits were termed by Gandhi in the historical period under discussion] seva opens out for us the possibility of another, counter-hegemonic, relationship between sevak and beneficiary—one in which comradery and mutual respect in battle replace the pity and condescension of the Gandhian model of pacifist service” (Srivatsan Reference Srivatsan2006, 433). However, the political goals of the Sangh's charity work—to keep the untouchables within the Hindu fold, attract them to the existing Congress, prevent any independent movement, and exclude them from management positions within the Sangh—made Ambedkar state “The programme of constructive work ha[s] the possibility of being converted into a plan to kill the Untouchables by kindness” (141, my emphasis). Ambedkar's condemnation of the Sangh's approach to untouchability and its political goals—along with the impossibility to re-envision seva—marked the end of seva's career within the Dalit movement and in its politics. However, my ethnographic account from contemporary north India testifies to the resurrection of seva precisely among its less likely proponent: BSP party activists.

Neither Ambedkar nor Gandhi could have envisioned the socio-economic processes that occurred within the vastly heterogeneous social category subsumed under the label of “Dalit”—that is, the many untouchable castes in India—nor the tragic resilience of untouchability in its violent and insidious contemporary manifestations. Nor perhaps could they have predicted, in their times, that a Dalit-led party and a Dalit woman might run the large state of UP, or the social forces and the change in power equilibria which were key to their ascendance.Footnote ⁴ This article argues that the answer to the question as to why seva has been resurrected in the unlikely setting of the BPS can be traced precisely in the trajectories of Dalit/low-caste class mobility, in the ways this mobility has inflected the appropriation of the repertoire of Indian political praxi and culture, and in the little-known dynamics of the nexus between upward class mobility, female gender, and Dalit/low-caste identity. I will now explain these three intertwined analytical leads.

Class Metamorphosis, Dalit Women Political Entrepreneurs, and a Note on Representation

The political roles of the BSP women analysed here epitomize the process of upward class mobility found in Dalit communities, which has been mainly achieved through the state's policy of affirmative action. Not only are these castes’ mobility a crucial factor in determining the entrance into politics of women from this background, as I will explain in the course of this article, but it is also the conditio sine qua non for the creation of the BSP itself. Founded through the efforts of a union of government employees called BAMCEFFootnote ⁵, the party initially catered to those upwardly mobile and office-seeking Scheduled Caste (SC) elite who encountered a representational blockage within the Congress party (Chandra Reference Chandra2004, 172ff), which had held together upper-caste, Muslim, and untouchable communities since Indian independence. While BAMCEF “provided the BSP with its initial base of cadres and considerable institutional support” (Chandra Reference Chandra2004, 144), members of the Chamar caste formed the core of the party's vote bank. This party's unique roots have led Sudha Pai to define the BSP as “a middle-class Party, formed by a new generation of educated, better off and upwardly mobile Dalit leaders. Its formation was deliberate, to gain a share in the fruits of development and political power, rather than a reaction to poverty, oppression and domination” (2002, 21).

Since the 1980s, the BSP agenda of the uplift of the Dalit community, put forward by charismatic leaders, has focused on the attainment of political power through electoral democracy in order to implement social transformation. To this end, the BSP's career has been marked by strategic alliances, which has led to the party's woman leader, Mayawati, becoming UP Chief Minister (CM), the highest authority in the state, three times during the 1990s. The party's strategies have attracted criticism for the ways the BSP has used them in UP “for short-term electoral gains and capture of power for brief periods, rather than for more substantial long-term gains, such as Dalit upliftment and social transformation” (Pai Reference Pai2002, 2). During the past decade, a strategy of progressively enlarging the target vote bank of bahujan samaj (the majority of the people)Footnote ⁶ into that of sarv samaj (all castes) has led to a dilution of the BSP's initial anti-upper caste stance and exclusivist pro-Dalit agenda, adding upper and backward caste communities to its fold.Footnote ⁷ This transformation helped the party to a landslide victory in the last state legislature elections in 2007, with Mayawati again becoming the state CM.

From a pan-Asian perspective, the creation of the BSP—as a long-term consequence of affirmative action—is truly unprecedented. Unsurprisingly, the BSP women analysed in this article are often from the Chamar (Dalit) caste and married to government employees.Footnote ⁸ Often, women have been encouraged and supported by their husbands or male relatives and have needed their consent and support to carry out political activities.Footnote ⁹ This article contends that the presence of seva among BSP low-caste women signals a positional shift from their historical role as “receivers” of social service and social work from late colonial India to that of “providers.” The use of seva, however, should not simply be viewed as the appropriation of an upper-caste idiom—that is, Dalit women should not be viewed as “prisoners” of Sanskritisation, a strategy of upward mobility that was, at times, adopted by Dalits but without much success. By contrast, seva marks a power shift whose reverberations exceed the caste system's socio-political and cultural space. BSP women have appropriated the upper-caste and class notions of philanthropy and charity of colonial memory by linking them to the idea of Dalit/poor communities’ the uplift of the Dalit/poor communities. Femininity idioms, notions of time, and other modes of self-representation testify to women's transformation. Rather than an emphasis on claims of difference which subalterns put forward when fighting for equal rights, equality, and justice (see Pandey Reference Pandey2006, 4739ff), BSP women's appropriation of seva points to the osmotic terrain in which their communities’ political culture should be situated.

For this very reason, it should not come as a surprise that during fieldwork BSP women at times considered seva to be the same thing as politics and often used it interchangeably with social work–testifying to seva's historicity. Seva derived its efficacy from political power since political power was essential to perform seva effectively. BSP women have taken the semblances of the political entrepreneur, a common image in grassroots politics,as the works by Stuart Corbridge et al. (Reference Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and Véron2005), Anirudh Krishna (Reference Krishna2003), and Craig Jeffrey, Patricia Jeffery, and Roger Jeffery (Reference Jeffrey, Jeffery and Jeffery2008) aptly document. Thus, modern seva becomes a lens to look into Partha Chatterjee's idea of political society whereby governmental agencies and the poor engage in the play of the former's obligation to provide the poor with services and the latter's expedients to attract these agencies’ attention through an array of actors, such as individuals with influential status, government functionaries, and political figures and institutions, as well as through an instrumental use of the vote (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2006, 40–1).

Political society is analyzed here through the lens of women long underrepresented in Indian political activism; that is, subalterns who have seized the role of the elite at its lowest echelons. While the gender and the Dalit/low-caste identities of the agents of seva disrupt the usual profiles found within the political society of post-liberalization India, this disruption is tied to yet another common misconception concerning the representation of Dalit/low-caste women. Since many women from these backgrounds experience highly punitive socio-economic, cultural, and political regimes, the way they are represented by others often overlooks how they practice agency within those constraints.Footnote ¹⁰ In contrast, the ethnographic subjects presented here emerge as non-victims who unproblematically appropriate the elite's historical political vocabulary and praxi. By portraying how BSP women perform as local leaders in the midst of the restrictive socio-economic regimes of north India, this article offers a counter-image to the Dalit/low-caste woman trope made up of suffering, untouchability, and violence, thus providing a much needed corrective to “passive” representation; in so doing, it further highlights diversity within the vast constituency of Dalit/low-caste women.

“Politics on Display” or “Politics of Display”? Place, Organizations, and People in the UP Capital

Lucknow is the center of state political activity and is host to the headquarters of all political parties. Its space is thick with symbols of political affiliation: leaders (netas) in starched kurta pajamas, their gunmen, and the blackened windows of SUVs which display their owner's political affiliations through small flags placed on the vehicle's side. Political symbolism thrives in the entire urban area. In north India, membership of a political party is proudly displayed on the facades of activists’ homes, with party flags and boards indicating activists’ names and the post assigned to them within the party hierarchy. The area opposite the State Assembly buildings, or Darul Shafa, is landscaped with party offices, “open air shops” selling political paraphernalia that cater to all orientations, tailors’ workshops where netas can have their fashionable kurtas sewn, and spaces where activists can stage their sit-ins (dharnas). While Lucknow thrives with protest marches, sit-ins, and rallies, its political density is also notable in its built environment: with regard to Dalit politics, the city space is constellated by statues, parks, and memorials, pointing to what I have called elsewhere a strategy of “presence in space” (2010, 44). The analysis of the politics of Ambedkar statues has shown its role in the partial reconciliation between Dalits and the state and the implications for nation-building (Jaoul Reference Jaoul2006, 204), testifying to the importance of both symbolic and material empowerment to the Dalits.

If the BSP is a widely studied phenomenon by now, the same cannot be said for those who have contributed to its successful performance: its activists. This article is the first account of women within the BSP and a rare one of Dalit and low-caste women on the crux of upward class mobility, political participation, and shifting gender roles, which builds on earlier work on rural Chamar women in UP (Ciotti Reference Ciotti2010a, 213ff). When compared to those in Congress and Communist parties or in Hindu Right organisations, BSP women are latecomers in the history of women and politics in India. While women from Dalit and low-caste communities have been involved in politics and social movements (see Omvedt Reference Omvedt1993, Sen Reference Ilina1990, Reference Ilina and Chaudhuri2004), previous accounts of Dalit institutionalised politics in UP do not provide information on women's participation. BSP women's activities date back to the 1980s; they were present in very small numbers in the BSP and the political formations that preceded it. In Lucknow, I interacted with about forty BSP women, the majority of whom started their political activities during the 1990s. As a result, this account primarily concerns women who belong to the original BSP vote bank. As mentioned earlier, many women are Chamar and are married to government employees, while a minority belongs to the Other Backward Castes (OBCs)—a legal classification for low- and middle-ranking castes distinct from those of untouchable background—and the Muslim community. Within the BSP, women at the grassroots are a minority compared to men. Almost all of the women I came to know had or had been assigned a formal position in the party, although rarely was the position of crucial importance. Women were part of the party's complex organizational structure, which spreads across five state assembly constituencies within the Lucknow district. Regular meetings take place in each constituency as well as at all levels of the party organization down to the smallest unit, the sector. During my fieldwork, I participated in women's daily activities in the home and in their political work. These consisted of attending meetings, election campaigning, staging demonstrations, political rallies, day-to-day proselytizing, collecting donations for the party, and helping people in need. These activities—especially during election time—required women to stay away from their homes for extended periods of time each day.

Based on in-depth interviews with women activists in 2004 and 2005, I was able to draw a number of sociological features that strongly suggest a degree of atypicality among them that enabled their political participation. The majority of the women were married, but some were also widows and separated and unmarried women. As a result of their husbands’ migration for work, women did not follow customary patrilocal rules, becoming the highest female senior household member who could delegate house chores to others. The urban setting facilitated women's participation when compared to the often more constraining village environment.Footnote ¹¹ Among married women, I found arranged inter-caste, love same-caste and inter-faith marriages, which indicates an element of choice for some women. Most women were not engaged in paid work, so they can be considered to be an elite compared to the masses of Dalit/low-caste women employed in menial waged labour. Elite status, however, should be considered in relative terms as it does not translate into an affluent lifestyle. Built on women's initial sociological difference, this article's following sections analyze the ways in which politics creates a different set of women compared to the often disenfranchised Dalit/low-caste masses.

The Non-feminine/Non-victim Party Worker: Disrupting the Gender and Caste Nexus?

Women's issues have not played a prominent role within the BSP, and, unlike other major parties, the BSP does not have a women's wing. BSP leader Mayawati—called Behenj, or respectable sister—is an unmarried woman viewed as having devoted her life to lift the Dalit community rather than build her own family. She has marked the beginning of a new era in Dalit politics by proclaiming her Chamar identity to the masses in public rallies, in spite of the fact that “Chamar” in north India is used with circumspection as it is often used as a term of abuse. Dalit cultural assertion in north India has also taken place through what I have termed a strategy of asserting “presence in time” (Ciotti 2010, 44), the forging of new Dalit histories. Drawing on these, Badri Narayan has analyzed the use of the low-caste viranganas (women warriors)—featured in the versions of the 1857 mutiny in contemporary Dalit historiography—to construct the political figure of Mayawati (Narayan Reference Narayan2006, 31). Mayawati, Narayan argues, “was depicted as a brave and wise leader who is also highly patriotic, having devoted her life to the service of the nation” (158). Building on the convergence of genders contained in the figure of the viranganas, Narayan also contends that “during public meetings with bureaucrats and government officials, [Mayawati] always projects her leadership qualities by highlighting her masculine characteristics of aggression and arrogance. She tries hard to subvert the upper-caste notions of femininity and lady-like behaviour, which are associated with meekness, mildness, subservience, docility and hierarchical form of address” (Narayan Reference Narayan2006, 159). Her self-fashioning project has culminated in Mayawati projecting herself as a living goddess (Narayan Reference Narayan2006, 162).

If Mayawati has subverted the image of the powerless untouchable woman, BSP women, too, have challenged such an image in their production of autonomous subjectivities. This challenge should be situated against the backdrop of the scholarship on the nexus between caste and gender. Uma Chakravarti contends that caste and gender has been pursued as two separate systems of stratification in the sociological scholarship on India until their link was made salient and turned into an object of inquiry in the period following the Mandal agitations. In 1991, the Indian government decided to reserve 27 percent of the posts in the central government for members of the OBCs, following the recommendation of the Backward Classes Commission, alias the Mandal Commission, a decision that sparked widespread protests among upper castes who saw their employment chances further reduced. As the debate on caste intensified, the emergence of Dalit feminism forced feminist scholars to reflect on the multilayered forms of subjection affecting Dalit women. Chakravarti observes that Dalit women are oppressed as laborers vis-à-vis their upper caste employers, and this oppression might also be shared in some form with the rest of Indian society (Reference Chakravarti2003, 88). The ways in which (low-caste) caste inflects gender has also led to the analysis of gender working within caste itself. While the oppression derived from the nexus between caste and patriarchy has been central in Ambedkar's opus as well as for Indian social reformers Phule and Periyar (see Rao Reference Rao and Rao2003, 22ff), Guru (Reference Guru1995) has stressed the contemporary role of Dalit patriarchy in shaping Dalit women's subjection. Whereas this scholarship has contributed to the break-down of normative understandings of “women” within the caste system, this article takes this contribution further to show how the above multi-fold subjection might not be universally experienced by Dalit and low-caste women. Moreover, by bringing to the fore the element of class mobility, this article shows how women perform under its effects both in politics and in the home.

As discussed earlier, BSP women occupy the lower rungs of the party organization and thus have a limited range of maneuver. Moreover, they are members of a party that has not made women's rights a priority in its political agenda. Except in rare cases, BSP women activists are not part of a feminist or other kind of social movement. While they did not appeal to the figure of the virangana for self-presentational purposes, never during my fieldwork did BSP women speak of themselves using a victimizing language or consider themselves as carrying a stigma. Interestingly, several women did not label themselves as “Dalit” as they viewed this as a disempowering form of self-representation—an argument developed futher in Ciotti 2010b—thus suggesting a bifurcation between the BSP's ideology and women's understanding of it. Equally important, the practice of untouchability (for those who belong to an untouchable caste) cannot be considered a biographical master-narrative. Within the BSP, women workers are elevated to a non-sexual status by virtue of an ideology of brotherhood/sisterhood: in the kinship of politics, BSP women proclaimed to me that “everybody behaves like brother and sister (bhai behen) and nobody sees a woman as a woman”. It is significant that a male party leader pointed out to me that in the party there are no bhabhis (brother's wives) or salis (wife's sisters), but only behens. Bhabhis and salis are affines and the sex taboo with them is not as compelling as for blood relations. Attempts to de-sexualize women activists echo historical fears of their sexuality in politics and resulting controlling attempts (see Kumar Reference Kumar2003, 94). The expedient of fictive kin relations in the party space also applies to social relations in the public sphere. An honor (izzat) economy is juxtaposed to these relations: if by doing politics women run the risk of losing izzat—and hence the need to preserve it—this is compensated by acquiring izzat and respect (man-samman), which has been unanimously indicated by women as the reward they gain from practicing politics.

The nexus between political activism and the increase in women's bargaining power in the home observed by Tanika Sarkar among Hindu Right women (1995, 210) also emerged in my research. Where BSP women might well have established more egalitarian gender relations in the household (for instance, by gaining a degree of flexibility about their presence at home), they do not aim to overtly subvert them. Doing politics and the possibility to go forward and to progress (Aghe bharna) was pitted against the one-dimensional nature of life as a housewife, implicitly questioning the ideal of femininity associated with this role. Women's de-sexualization within the party and their own underplaying feminine roles seem to point in the same direction. Although some women still made a point of cooking at home, the role of housewife was not a coveted one. For example, making unleavened bread (roti banana), symbolizing the activity of cooking in general, was the hallmark of a life that cannot either confer notoriety or yield knowledge. While BSP women are far from the violent and aggressive female figures found within Hindu Right organisations, with regard to BSP women's dislike for their domestic roles, my findings are again evocative of the feelings of the latter.Footnote ¹² This suggests a link between the rebellion against gender expectations placed on sections of Indian women and their recruitment into political projects of various natures, with the consequences these might entail.Footnote ¹³

Where life as a housewife is often dismissed in favor of the higher rewards deriving from being a local politician, the party was seen by BSP women as resembling a family, a home, or even as “father.” These metaphors are reminiscent of the extended family, a “construct for the expansion of women's realm beyond the home into arenas of public activity in the context of the Indian nationalist movement” (Minault Reference Minault and Minault1981, 13). When asked whether they would ever leave the BSP for another party, women said that this was one's own home (apna ghar)—referring to the party originally being mainly a Dalit party—and added not wanting to live in a rented home (kiraya ka ghar). BSP women's rejection of the powerlessness of domesticity ties in with expressions associated with “going out.” This is a synonym for acquiring knowledge, of seeing the world (dunya dekhna), and becoming known—all things which would not happen to a housewife. The description of the meanings of politics is also marked by the use of metaphoric language—for example, to point to the difference between politics and everyday life. In the words of Meera, who at the time of fieldwork had been in politics for the last twenty-five years: “everyday life is like ‘frogs in a well’ (kue ka medak).” This is a way of indicating that those in a seclusion regime (pardah) do not know anything about the outside world.Footnote ¹⁴ In Meera's view, “politics is like an ocean, in which a lot of animals live” (Reference Meera2004). Although the devaluation of domestic life in favour of politics has again brought to the fore the division between private and public, a number of women frequently pointed to the pervasiveness of politics in both spheres. This pervasiveness also translated into an “addiction”: some women used the term “intoxication” (nasha) to describe their relation to politics.

Modern Self-sacrifice between Mystique and Political society

Nasha does not seem to be in contradiction with the more “chaste” idiom of seva that women used to describe politics. While interacting with BSP women and when interviewing them, the idea of seva emerged unsolicited. Outside the context of the interview, it was often offered as a self-representation, a reason to join a party of the poor and the Dalits, something one could do without being educated (according to a graduate activist), and something one could do even without her husband's support for her political activities. While travelling in a car with two BSP women activists, I witnessed one of them telling the other that doing things for others and getting work done for them (kam karana) made her happy. Compare this observation with the use of seva by a woman activist in the Durga Vahini, a Hindu Right organization, in Lucknow. Amrita Basu has observed how the performance of seva allowed the Durga Vahini activist to go out of her home without encountering her family's opposition even when she had a small child to look after. The activist, according to Basu, described a newfound sense of pleasure in serving others (Reference Basu, Jeffery and Basu1999, 180).

BSP women do not differentiate between seva and samaj karya (social work). More important, women's narratives point to an overlap between these activities and politics. I asked Sapna, an activist from a political family, to articulate the difference between the two: “there shouldn't be any difference between politics and social service: you should give respect, procure jobs, recruit people into the party, go to poor hamlets, listen to people's sorrow, make appeals to people” (Reference Sapna2004). Another activist, Medha, claimed her goal was to make sure that “women and children will be given education and development, and in politics the goal is the same. As you do the seva of parents-in-law, politics is seva of others” (Reference Medha2005). Activist Shaila described her activities as follows: “to go to the police station, install a new pipeline in the locality, help poor girls’ marriages, and if someone is ill, take him/her to hospital and bear the expenses, in general ‘to get other people to do the work (kam karvana)’” (Reference Shaila2004)—in short, the work of the developmental state. Activist Meenakshi told me of how her social work activities in slums led her into politics (Reference Meena2004). As for women in the nationalist movement, this shows the link between social work and the world of politics.

BSP women often use the expression “hard work” (mehnat) to refer to politics: hard work on foot, door to door, and under any climatic circumstances. Hard work and sacrifice are also linked to a notion of unlimited time that women can devote to politics. Women would not hesitate to say “we don't look at time (time nahi dekhte hai)” and that they were available twenty-four hours a day. If there is any work to do at any time of the day and or night, they will be ready. If they need to go to a police station, they are able to visit it even in the middle of the night. When compared to the usual restrictions encountered in the literature on women in north India, BSP women's freedom of mobility speaks of alternative gender regimes. Priya, a powerful leader in the past who had travelled to many states to recruit supporters for the Dalit movement—in particular, women—recalled how she left her twelve days-old daughter at home, and carried out seva for eighteen years. She did not look after her children and never did any housework, leaving these activities to her husband (Reference Priya2004). Other women left their small children at home to attend the needs of their community and did not perform a motherly role. Going to jail, albeit for short periods, is also part of the sacrifice mystique. But leaving small babies at home or going to jail for politics does not sound like the ultimate sacrifice: Meera, who had been in the forefront of mobilization in the 1980s, the formative years of the party and the political formations which preceded it, said she would give her life for the party.

A woman needs to be a neta or leader to do seva effectively. As a result, the overlap between politics and seva is sometimes explained as the same “work” (kam, i.e. someone's matter) that can be accomplished more efficiently by party workers rather than by those without a political affiliation. Work is more likely to get done, and more quickly and successfully, if the party's government (sarkar) is in place. (This was not the case at the time of fieldwork, when the BSP was part of the opposition and the state government was led by the Samajwadi Party, supported by the middle-ranking Yadav caste). Sarkar is a synonym of “power” (women use the English term) and women are empowered by their proximity to it. When I asked her about the difference between politics and social work, activist Sapna said: “There is a difference: if an ordinary person goes to an official, the official will not listen; if a neta goes, the official will listen. Work done through politics will be done faster. Of course things change if the party is in power or not” (Reference Sapna2004). Gauri, who participated in the party's life since its early days, argued: “If my party is in power, I can use power (power ka istemal), and the work is done faster. If I have to do ten jobs, now that there is no power I can only do one or two” (Reference Gauri2004). When I asked activist Gauri how much politics she managed to do from home and how much from outside, she replied that most work was done from outside, but she could make phone calls from home. She said: “When ‘power’ is not there, then we have to go out; when ‘power’ is there, I use the phone” (Reference Gauri2004).

Unleashing Women's Power: Challenging Men and Male-dominated Spaces

The sacrifice mystique that underlies seva or politics does not contradict women's public manifestation of strength, so should be seen as complementary instead. Political activities have enabled women to invade and challenge public spaces and institutions replete with the exercise of male power and violence. A good example is staging demonstrations. BSP women claim they can be in the forefront of a protest march because the police will not harm them—which recalls the role Gandhi imagined for women in the nationalist movement. Writing on the Mahila Aghadi, the Shiv Sena women's wing, Julia Eckert points out the “selflessness of protesting mothers, sisters and daughters and wives” and the resonance of these women's forms of protest with “traditions of civil disobedience” as well as the police's caution in dealing with them (2003, 145). Women believe they gain a sort of invisible immunity: Sapna, mentioned above, narrated an episode that occurred at a pro-Mayawati protest years earlier. On that occasion, a police constable was about to hit her with a wooden stick (lathi, a weapon carried by the police). Sapna had then warned him “if you beat me I'll definitely beat you.” He stopped with his lathi up in the air.

Not only have they gained a form of immunity, BSP women also claim that they can achieve things men cannot and can do more work. Activist Meena lives by a large sewage canal with her two small children and has several pending court cases at the same time. Despite being uneducated, she has taken the help of educated friends to write to all the district authorities and has spoken with the media about her cases. Meena claims, “you need ten men to do something, you can do the same thing with five women.” I asked her why. She replied: “any official is scared of women! If there is an official behaving badly, a woman has the power to beat the person with a shoe, and that person will be suspended! An official cannot beat a woman!” Meena also contends that police beating (lathi-charge) will not be carried out on women, but women can be beaten up if they are alone and do not have a political background. She also claimed that police women will not beat other women, and listen more to people and are more understanding than male officers (Reference Meenakshi2004). However, that women do not get beaten by the police is not entirely true. They do, and a number of informants who participated in mobilization activities in the early days of the party showed me their scars from broken glass bangles (churis, a symbol of married status) as well as other injuries when the police attacked them.Footnote ¹⁵ However, no episode of violence has been reported in recent times.

If the police are less likely to attack women, if officials are scared of them, the police station (thana) and its smaller unit (choki), some of the most feared spaces by Indian citizens, are the places in which women exercise their powers and abilities to help, defend, and rescue citizens from the state itself. The thana is not just a point of geographical reference in people's lives and their addresses, but features in almost all conversations and narratives related to women's activities. BSP women's knowledge of legal procedures certainly surpasses that of ordinary citizens. The ability to talk to a policeman is viewed as a sign of strength. BSP local leader Saraswati was talking about a friend, also a politician, and described her to me as clever (tej): “you should see how she speaks to the police sub-inspector (daroga).” Satyavati, a long-standing party worker, does not hesitate to say that she gets izzat in police station and she speaks very gently to the police. I once asked her what she would do if a sub-inspector addressed her loudly: she replied that she would speak even louder!

All women's narratives regarding police cases, unsolicited and not, have elements in common. It is a matter of honor and pride to be known in police stations. Not only do women accompany people to police stations, and they go regardless of time of the day, but—as mentioned above—they also claim they are given izzat there. Activist Vanita describes herself as free (using the English term) because her children do all the housework and she travels independently to many state districts and police stations in Lucknow. She told me that “one can just mention my name and get things done in police stations.” At one time, she learned of a man in lock-up after 1 a.m. She went to the police station alone, and found out that the man was instead at a police check, so she went there. At the police check, the inspector asked her, “Can anybody call you at night and you will come?” Vanita replied, “It is my duty to go when there is work. If there is work at night I'll come with rakhi Footnote ¹⁶ and I will tie it to your wrist. If anybody's brother is in trouble, then why can't his sister go? You can consider me as a mother, sister, daughter, wife, whatever you want.” Her husband trusts her very much, Vanita says, and that is why he does not listen to any remark on her behaviour (Vanita Reference Vanita2004).

Things in police stations might not work as smoothly as they sound, however, and a BSP woman has told me about being mistreated in a police station on one occasion. However, there is definitely a degree of success in women's activities (see also Ciotti Reference Ciotti2010b). More important, not only can these women deal with situations unthinkable for ordinary citizens—and all the more so for Dalit/low-caste women—but they also enjoy a remarkable degree of freedom. Moreover, the idea that women can do better than men, or, for instance, that women are at the forefront when they have to fight in public spaces while men are left behind, appears as an attempt to emasculate them and conveys a message which differs substantially from notions of gender equality. It is a display of a superior moral and physical strength attached to the female gender turned from a being a “disadvantage”—especially in the problematic UP environment—into its opposite. Interestingly, this overturns the gender asymmetry in men's favor observed by Basu that inspired women's activism in ethnic and religious nationalism and Hindu Right women in India (Reference Basu2003, 23).

BSP women's interaction with the state often translates into interventions aimed at “taming” its representatives. Given the infamous record of atrocities against Dalits in UP, together with extremely low conviction rates, the account offered here sounds almost implausible. By virtue of their affiliation to the BSP, it is unlikely that women activists will experience violence at the hand of the police. Conversely, other citizens—not necessarily of Dalit background—might benefit from these women's help. As a result, a number of activities subsumed under seva become a shield against social exploitation and humiliation by the government apparatus—from which women from an upper class milieu are surely more protected.